Nothing Gold Can Stay

In this frosty winter weather I keep thinking back to last autumn when I visited Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, New Hampshire. The colorful trees wrapped you in warm reds and yellows. All was quiet and peaceful.

While he lived in this house, he wrote some of his most famous poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Fire and Ice.” These were included in a collection entitled New Hampshire published in 1923, which is probably what earned him the Nobel Prize the following year. But, the poem that keeps coming to my mind these days is “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Indeed, Mr. Frost. Indeed.